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The Reverie

I am being led to my end.

Time seems to slow to an otherwise pleasurable speed, slow enough for me to observe my surroundings with care and concision, even as rough hands push me and jostle me to my fate. Unfortunately, what I see does little to console me, as it wrenches my heart further and more grotesquely than it is wrenched already.

Light envelops my eyes, implying a cordial setting, one of joy and warmth like that of a beachside picnic. Rather, as the light fades, I see I am in a shining-black town square of brick, more than twenty miles from end to end, walled on all sides, with an azure-blue sky above me. My bare feet curl on the cold stones. My sullied blood drips and makes tiny splashes on the black ground. I see for the first time my naked body, beaten and whipped, persecuted and brutalized, devoid of any garment. Yet I feel no humiliation. I look up and see, in the middle of the square, a platform of knobby oak, on which looms a beam with, at its apex, a black, knotted rope of hemp, looped in a noose.

My death rope.

There are many people, thousands of them, gathered here, some to satiate their curiosity, some to ensure the damned's passage to oblivion, and others just to watch the spectacle, yet all of them divided into three groups. The farthest left group consists of commoners, of ordinary citizens, all sporting looks of ambivalence, ambiguity, or animosity and all dressed in matching white button-up shirts and beige pants. The center group is the largest. It holds a thousand shapes, human shapes, for it would be incorrect to call them anything else. Unlike the commoners, the shapes all dressed in dark suits, dark shoes, dark ties, and all had dark watches. All of their faces are grotesque, hideous, gut-wrenching, and, as if their repugnance isn't enough to mask their faces, a question mark tattoo lay etched in each shape's face, each in the same position. They stand stock-still like statues and say things, blasphemous things, but it is impossible to determine which of them said what. I pass them, am forced to listen to their words, and bury their hatred inside me.

The third group stops me, or rather, I stop for the third group. Before now, I had seen so much uniformity that it had made me sick. The citizens wear white button-up shirts and beige pants. All of them. The shapes wear dark clothing and grotesque faces. All of them. Even the guards behind me, they who treat me like scum, wear white vests, white trousers, and carry swords in black sheaths and guns in black holsters. All of them. But the third group differs. Men, women, and children, about a hundred total, dwarfed by the common and shape crowds, lie about in a penned-in area of filth. They vary in height, weight, age, facial features; indeed, they are here simply because they differ. All of them, like me, are naked. All have bruises and gashes and other wounds. All are naked, filthy, and emaciated. Some have words, horrifying, disgusting words, written on their bodies. Some weep. Some hold themselves in weakness. Some beg for death. A man--I know nothing of him, not his name or his life--runs up to the fence, cutting his hands on the wire, and yells at the guards to shoot him. One second later, a loud CRACK. He falls to the ground. The guard who fired grins, his gun barrel still smoking, and mutters under his breath that he's glad to be rid of another one.

A tear falls from my eye. The prisoners will find death shortly, but the commoners pass the time by throwing stones and sticks into the pen while the shapes stand completely frozen, spewing insults that would offend the devil himself. I look closer at the vulgar words written on the bodies of the prisoners. My eyes are nearly blinded by evil. I see many words of the same meaning. Every utterance brings a bloodied tear to my eye.

I find myself on the platform of knobby oak. There is a man sitting on a high bench in front of me, wielding a gavel as though he is a judge. In fact, he calls himself Judge World. He is a small man, an incongruity amongst the cookie-cutter crowds that stand at my back. He is ugly as sin, perhaps uglier than the shapes. I refuse to hear his words, but cannot help catching snippets: "...a menace to society...deserve to be put down like animals...finally, elimination of anomalies...hunt you down...deserve to die...any last words?"

I look at him, look at his beady eyes, his grotesque chin, his evil smile. I want to say "You'll burn in hell for this" or perhaps "Satan is saving a seat for you", but neither will suffice. Neither conveys my anger, my hopelessness, or my grief well enough. So I tell him my name. My age. What I do. He asks me why I chose to condemn myself.

I say that it is not a crime to be different.

Everyone gasps, even the shapes, even the prisoners. Judge World says nothing more. He laughs. And laughs. A guard shoots me. "Never again will you harm our people, out animals, or our lands with your distorted ways," the judge says. I keel over, burning with pain, screaming as blood drips down my chest onto the wood. Judge World keeps laughing until he is breathless. He nods. The guards push me in front of the rope. Everyone is watching. I expect death in an instant, but there is no hangman. I look up at the black rope. Everyone is watching. Mocking.

I realize. I must be my own hangman. I must drop the rope to end my life.

I understand I am not alone. The prisoners watch me with eyes of repressed individuals who wished they could do more. I comport myself, ignoring the staring eyes. I am not alone. I know what happens next.

I pull the rope across my throat, breathe one last time, then kick the lever. The platform opens, my legs give out, and I feel nothing but death.

It is only after my feet have stopped kicking that I realize my incorporeal self has left my body. I watch from the ramparts, no longer human. I am smoke. A ghost. Pure nothingness. The commoners and shapes are cheering my demise. Children pelt my body with stones. Shapes point and recite statements so vile that they make the women of the pen faint. I feel like crying. Ghosts don't cry. Smoke has no feeling.

I become something more.

The square fades from my eyes. Whiteness surrounds me. I lack a body, yet I sense the world around me. But it is not a world; it is a world between worlds, a divergence plane, filled to the brim with nothing.

A silver pond coalesces in front of me, drawing me close. It is a mirror. But I see neither myself nor nothing in the pond's reflection.

What I see is a beast, a creature never seen to the universe in which I lived. It is a grotesque mess of creatures and objects I had seen before when I had still lived. The beast's head is that of a lion, horned like a rhinoceros, atop a chest of scales and skin. Two wings adorn the beasts back, eagle's wings, while a tail like a snake's wriggles from its rear. It stands upright on oxen legs and grasps the air with the paws of a bear. Its eyes are black diamonds, dead yet full of life, glittering in the white mist. Symbols, signs unbeknownst to man, shine on its form. It is a monster, a wretched fiend. It is me.

I draw my hand back. It is brown, hairy, and adorned with stubby claws. I have become the creature in the pond. I want to yell, to scream, to tear this false form from my real body.

The creature in the pond disappears. My image, my human self, stares at me from the other side. I look with my black glittering eyes. The pond evaporates.

I am cursed. Blighted. Bound to this demonic form. I cannot say if this is punishment. Again, I have done no wrong.

Suddenly.

Bliss.

A voice rings out, but speaks no words. But I understand. I understand that the voice is speaking words, but words that only I can hear. The voice continues. I listen. It caresses me, captivates me. The voice says that my new form is not a curse, but rather a blessing. I say I do not understand. My voice sounds rough, hoarse, as though someone has sandpapered my throat.

The voice tells me to wait. I see no other choice. I sit on my rump, pushing my snake tail between my oxen legs, and wait.

Four million years flash by in an instant.

I am before Him. He, the owner of the voice that had told me to wait, stands before me, the beast-spirit of the man wrongly killed eons before. I make Him out as a lamb, a shining gold lamb with electric-blue eyes so bright that I cannot make myself look into them. But He approaches me on His four legs, nuzzles my haunch, comforts me, baying all the while. Behind Him the portal to Hell is open. Judge World, the shapes, and the commoners writhe in it, burning eternally. I grimace. He sees it. He closes the portal, sealing the fissure.

"O child, O sufferer," The lamb says to me in a voice as dulcet as calm wind, "How do you feel?"

I do not expect this question, so for a moment I have no answer. Then, finding my voice, I say a final word before I am committed to Heaven, a martyr.

"Content."